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Recently I posted an article about Arkanoid DS and its Paddle Controller Accessory. In it I stated that I love game-specific peripherals. You know what's changed since then? Absolutely nothing! I just received another Japan-only game/accessory combo for the DS called Slide Adventure: Mag Kid with its Slide Controller. What I found when I opened the box was quite surprising. Hit past the break to read about what I discovered.
I've heard about Slide Adventure: Mag Kid and its Slide Controller before I'd gotten it. The controller fits in your DS's GBA slot and sits below the DS as if it were on a little platform. You then move the entire system/accessory combo on a table or other flat surface to move your character on screen. I was expecting the Slide Controller to sense the player's movememnts through the use of metal ball bearings. I was delighted with what I got instead. What I found instead was that the accesory utilized the same technology that optical mice on almost all modern PC's use. I was amazed. The accessory basically turns your entire system into a gigantic computer mouse! After all I've seen in the video game world over the years, I am constantly amazed by the amount of surprises I still find and this was definitely one of them. Furthermore, as I was playing the game, I found out that the Slide Controller actually has a built in rumble feature. I was really impressed.
I then played the game itself. Slide Adventure: Mag Kid, far as I can tell, is about a boy who's constantly loosing his toys around the house. It's your duty as a sentient magnet (created by the strike of a lightning bolt) to move about the house and find his toys. Yes, that's right: it's a bunch of Japanese weirdness. Chances are that if you're like me, though, you'll love every minute of it! The game starts with a quest to find missing limbs of the boy's toy robot. You start on the floor of the boy's bedroom and you must explore it to find the missing parts. Your character is too small to move around the house so you have to hitch a ride on various items around your current surface to take you to other areas. For instance, the boy's pencil case is on the floor. If you go inside it he'll carry it to his desk where you can then explore it.
The actual gameplay is good fun. Since you're a magnet, you can attach yourself to many of the enemies lying around the house. You absorb the abilities of the first enemy (i.e. a soap sud baddy gives you the ability to shoot bubbles) and any enemies you collect after that follow behind creating a snake-like form. You must use these forms to battle enemies, solve puzzles, and fight bosses. The Slide Controller guides your character very intuitively and I really enjoyed playing the game with it. I made it up to the first boss battle where I had to fight a group of teddy bears on top of drawers. You must absorb the ability of some armored charging enemies and as the bears are attacking by shooting they drawers toward you, you charge back at the open drawers to damage them. The boss battle utilized the elemental system well and was a blast to play.
I was impressed with the way that I had to use the DS with this game. It was inventive and new. Most of all, the game was fun, though a little easy. I would say, though, that because of the nature of the game, it's not exactly portable. What would you do if you saw someone playing this game on the floor of a moving bus? I'd probably give him a high five but that's besides the point. The game isn't hard to figure out if you don't know Japanese as well. If you want a new experience with your DS and a neat accessory that will almost certainly never come to the US, definitely pick this game up.
